They won’t know it’s them. They are too dumb. In this , we will look at the end of Capote’s relationship with the Swans, the fallout from the publication of his chapters, and the writer’s tragic end.

In the late 1960s, Truman Capote was the toast of New York City. His social circle consisted of some of the most elegant women in the world, whom he nicknamed the Swans. These women were famous for their beauty, style, wealth, and social status. Capote was fascinated by their lives, and they let him in on all of their secrets, never suspecting that he was quietly shaping a book he believed would be his masterpiece.

The Swans included Babe Paley, the wife of William S. Paley, the founder of CBS. Babe was known for her impeccable style and was often listed among the best-dressed women in the world. There was Slim Keith, born Nancy Gross, a New York socialite and style icon with deep connections in Hollywood and literary circles. Gloria Guinness, a Mexican-born socialite who married into the Guinness beer dynasty, was celebrated for her elegance and prominence in high society.

CZ Guest, another socialite and style icon, was famous for her chic fashion sense and was a regular on best-dressed lists. Pamela Churchill Harriman, the former wife of Randolph Churchill, son of Winston Churchill, later became the U.S. ambassador to France. She was known for her charm and marriages to influential men. There was also Marella Agnelli, an Italian noblewoman married to Gianni Agnelli, head of Fiat Automobiles, admired for her sophisticated taste and involvement in the arts.

Lee Radziwill, born Caroline Lee Bouvier, the sister of Jackie Kennedy, was an American socialite, public relations executive, and interior decorator. She became renowned for her refined style and deep associations with high society. These women were not only socialites but also fashion icons and muses for designers and artists. They were often featured in fashion magazines and moved in the most elite social circles of their time.

Capote was enthralled by their world and believed he could transform their lives into great literature. He was working on a book, blending fact and fiction, that he thought would be his best work, doing for American literature what Proust had done for French literature. However, the years dragged on. He was drinking heavily and producing almost nothing. The book was to be called *Answered Prayers*.

“I will finish by January 1969,” he declared confidently. “Four or five people get exactly what they want and the result… I’m not telling. It is sort of about some people I know and places I’ve been.” Because of Truman’s success, it sounded fantastic to many. Twentieth Century Fox quickly bought the film rights for $350,000. All Capote had to do was deliver a 60,000-word manuscript.

With the deadline looming, he still wasn’t writing. He had become addicted to the effortless pleasures of the rich—the very people he was about to betray. Despite missing the January deadline as he continued to go on holidays and road trips with his Swans, Random House still gave him a three-book contract worth $750,000. He no longer enjoyed the process of writing. Instead, he preferred the life of leisure, not the tedium of sitting alone with the page.

Random House gave him a new deadline for *Answered Prayers*: January 1970. He missed that as well. Instead of staying home to work, he went on a cruise with the Agnellis and brought along a few excerpts from the book. Although Marella spoke English well, she asked Truman to read them aloud. She had been an avid reader of his previous work and considered him one of the great writers of his age.

As he read, she found herself wondering who this person was. Where was the great writer she knew? The work was shallow, trivial, and simply cruel. Some of the people mentioned she recognized, others she didn’t, but the tone was the same throughout: petty and vicious. “Oh, Truman, this is a gossip column,” she told him.

She had long noticed how he would put the other ladies and their husbands down when they weren’t around. But this moment was a harsh awakening. She had considered him her closest friend. Seeing that beneath it all he was just a petty gossip columnist, she decided to end the friendship. She stepped away before he turned his pen on her.

Lee Radziwill, too, trusted Truman deeply. During one of their meetings, she told him the most painful secret of her life: she was consumed with jealousy of her sister, Jackie Kennedy. Lee was married to a Polish prince and lived in an English estate, with houses around the world, yet she still felt overshadowed. She confessed that her jealousy made her feel sad, empty, and lost. She hated herself for it, but she couldn’t control it.

At a dinner at Buckingham Palace given for the President and First Lady, Prince Philip leaned over to Lee and said, “You are just like me. You always walk three steps behind.” Her marriage was crumbling, and she was having an affair with Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis. In 1962, when Jackie and John’s son Patrick died, Lee invited Jackie to visit her. The moment Jackie arrived, Lee realized she’d made a terrible mistake.

Onassis couldn’t take his eyes off Jackie, showering her with constant attention and once again pushing Lee into the background. Immediately after the lunch, Truman called his friend Cecil and told him everything. “Had lunch with Princess Lee. My God, how jealous she is of Jackie. Understand her marriage is all but finito.” Lee trusted Truman absolutely.

When Jackie married Aristotle Onassis, Lee saw it as a betrayal and called Truman in anguish. “How could she do this to me? How could this happen?” she cried. In his unfinished novel, he referred to Lee and Jackie as “a pair of Western Geisha girls.” The cruelty was hidden behind literary flourish. To the people involved, it was devastating.

By January 1971, Truman was so late delivering the book that Twentieth Century Fox was demanding he repay the $200,000 advance they had already given him. He was drinking whiskey, taking pills, and at 57 he no longer had the ambition or discipline to do what was expected. Truman received all kinds of warnings about publishing “La Côte Basque, 1965,” an 11,000-word excerpt from *Answered Prayers*, scheduled to appear in *Esquire* magazine in November 1975. He had been telling these stories privately all over town, but this was different. Once printed, there would be no denying what he had done.

His biographer warned him: “You can’t publish this. The characters are barely cloaked. Everyone will recognize themselves, and worse, others will recognize them too.” Truman brushed this aside with a wave of his hand. “Nah, they’re too dumb,” he said. The novella takes place over lunch in Manhattan, with the action hopping from one table to the next. While he used pseudonyms for the Swans, everyone in their world knew exactly who they were.

Lady Ina Coolbirth, based on Slim Keith, drinks champagne and spreads scandalous gossip about everyone. She tells a story about staying with the Kennedys when she was 18, and how, late one night, Joe Kennedy came into her room and assaulted her. She speaks bitterly of growing older and concludes that only gay men will be kind to her. Gloria Vanderbilt and Carol Matthau appear under their own names. Truman mocks their serial divorces as they gossip about other women in their circle.

He sums women like Charlie Chaplin’s wife up as “charmingly incompetent adventuresses.” He seats Lee and her sister Jacqueline at a table and describes Jackie as unrefined, exaggerated, “an artful female impersonator impersonating Mrs. Kennedy.” But the one hurt most deeply was Babe Paley. The Paleys had given him gifts, flown him around the world, and ushered him into the highest circles. Babe had considered him almost family.

In the story, he includes a businessman named Dillon, clearly modeled on William Paley. Dillon’s one-night stand with a woman obviously based on Marie Harriman is described in vivid detail. The story is told by Lady Ina, who claims she too had an affair with Dillon. The event took place in the 1950s, when Marie’s husband was Governor of New York, and it is rendered with humiliating precision.

Lady Ina questions how Dillon, a Jew, could go for such a woman when he was already married to the beautiful Cleo Dillon—clearly Babe Paley. She claims Dillon only slept with the governor’s wife because he was a Jew who was not allowed fully into Protestant high society, and this was his way of getting revenge. Truman writes that Dillon “wanted to revenge himself on that smug hog-bosom, make her sweat and squeal and call him Daddy.” Lady Ina continues the tale, recounting that they had sex in the marital bed with the lights off.

As the governor’s wife left, already dressed, he turned on the lights and saw the bed covered in blood. She had been on her period. Dillon assumed she had done it on purpose to get even with him. The businessman then spent the entire night trying to scrub the sheets clean to hide it from his wife. Babe had told Truman this story in confidence, believing him to be her closest friend, and there it was, laid bare in print.

Worse still, everyone knew who it was about. Truman was giddy with anticipation as the publication approached. He was convinced this would cement his literary legacy. But when the issue of *Esquire* came out, the phone stopped ringing. The silence from his friends was immediate and total.

He grew pale and stayed in his room, reading and rereading the pages. “What did they expect?” he said. “I’m a writer and I use everything. Did all those people think I was there just to entertain them?” He remained bullish in public, insisting that *Answered Prayers* would be well received. To talk-show host Dick Cavett, he bragged, “No one’s going to be the least bit annoyed with me unless they’ve been left out.”

Only as the dust began to settle after the excerpt’s explosive publication did Capote understand what he had done. His best friends were gone. He locked himself in his flat in the United Nations Plaza, sobbing on his bed and repeating, “I didn’t mean to. I thought they’d come back.” Babe Paley never spoke to him again.

When Babe died of lung cancer three years after the excerpt’s publication, Truman wasn’t invited to the funeral. He sent Slim Keith a note attempting to rekindle their friendship, writing, “I have decided to forgive you.” She never replied. Marella Agnelli did not appear in the story, as she had already broken with Truman. CZ Guest, however, stayed close to him and did not turn away.

As for Lee Radziwill, she ultimately turned her back on Truman during his lawsuit with Gore Vidal. In response, Truman lashed out, attacking her and the Kennedys on television. He ridiculed her jealousy of Jackie, her hopes of marrying Onassis, and her supposed ingratitude. That was the final break. Lee cut him out of her life completely.

Truman’s cocaine and alcohol use escalated. He slurred his words in public and began to suffer hallucinations. At one book reading, he kept losing his place, reading the same passages over and over again. His mind and body were failing him. The dazzling wit of New York society was disintegrating before everyone’s eyes.

Perhaps sensing the end was near, Capote booked a one-way flight to Los Angeles. He went to stay with Joanne Carson, the Swan married to the thinly veiled “Miami philanderer” in his novella, who was meant to be Johnny Carson. Despite everything, she remained a loyal friend. Truman told her he felt fragile. Joking to keep the mood light, she said, “Truman, don’t you dare. You die and I’ll never speak to you again.”

When his breathing became difficult, Capote begged her not to call an ambulance. He died in her arms, calling out “Mama.” He was only 59. For years, he had been in emotional and physical pain. Gore Vidal reacted to his rival’s death by saying it was “a wise career move.”

An incomplete version of *Answered Prayers*—three chapters—was eventually published. The full manuscript has taken on a mythic status. Some say it is stashed in a Greyhound bus station in Nebraska. Others claim it lies sealed in a bank vault, was burned in Capote’s fireplace, or was never finished at all.

“But my dear, so few things are fulfilled,” Capote once said. “What are most lives but a series of incomplete episodes?” His own life and work became a haunting example of that sentiment. The Swans, whom he adored and betrayed, became both his greatest inspiration and his undoing.

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